Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Indian Novel As An Agent of History

This essay was published earlier this month at India in Transition, a website run by the Center for Advanced Study on India at the University of Pennsylvania.

It is a universally-acknowledged truth that human beings experience
their lives as embedded not just in time, but in history. To interpret history,
they employ a variety of instruments: personal experience and cultural memory,
political ideology and historiography, even (and sometimes especially) myths
and stories. Among these instruments, a somewhat late-arriving one in India –
only 150 years old – is the novel.

What is so noteworthy about the novel? It can be argued that as a form
of story, let alone history, the novel does not enjoy great currency in India,
for it is neither an indigenous form nor a mass one. Cinema has far greater
popular appeal, and the stories and narrative conventions of epics like
the Ramayana inform everyday life and moral reasoning much
more than any novel (notwithstanding the apparent desire of nearly every Indian
to write a novel, ideally a bestseller).

Yet if the novel is indispensable to any reading of modern Indian
history, that is because a preoccupation with Indian history ­is a thread
running through the work of some of the greatest Indian novelists, across more
than two dozen Indian languages and literary traditions. In the great diversity
of narrative forms and interpretative cruxes generated by the Indian novel,
there lies a wealth of wisdom about Indian history and, therefore, about how to
live in the present time as an Indian and a South Asian, a modern of the
twenty-first century and a third- or fourth-generation denizen of the often
disorienting age of democracy.

Consider Fakir Mohan Senapati’s enormously sly, satirical, and
light-footed novel Six Acres and a Third, written in Odia in 1902
and only translated into English in 2006. The plot of Senapati’s novel revolves
around a village landowner’s plot to usurp the small landholding of some humble
weavers. But this is also the Indian village in the high noon of colonialism,
and the first readers of Senapati’s story would have delighted in the
narrator’s many potshots against new and perplexing British institutions, administered
by a new ruling class of English-educated Indians. “Ask a new babu his
grandfather’s father’s name, and he will hem and haw,” the narrator chirps.
“But the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily
roll off his tongue.”

The story appears to be generating, then, an argument about history and
political resistance. India must rid itself of its colonial masters because
they have delegitimized many of the traditional knowledge systems and truths of
Indian society, and in the process made the modern Indian self imitative and
inauthentic. The argument persists in India today in debates about
“westernization.”

But this raises a new question: was traditional Indian village society
itself very wise, just, or balanced? As the story progresses, we see that
anti-colonial sentiments have not blinded the narrator to the need to subject
his own side to the scrutiny of satire. When we hear that “the priest was very
highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women,” and that “the goddess
frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything,”
the complacency and mystifications of Brahmanical Hinduism are also laid bare,
as is the credulity about those who would place their faith in such an order.

Senapati’s irony is effective not despite, but because of its
double-sidedness. It leads to a point useful as much in our time as his own:
criticism of a clearly marked-out “other” – to Indians in the early twentieth
century, the British; to Hindu nationalists today, Muslims and Christians –
often legitimizes a sweeping and complacent faith in one’s own worldview;the
search for truth or meaning in history must remain a charade if not accompanied
by the capacity for self-criticism. The novel’s implied argument is liberating
not because it is comforting or inspiring, but precisely because it is
disenchanted. Fiction itself shows us how human beings are fiction-making
creatures, and must therefore take special care to scrutinize what they believe
to be foundational truths.

A different kind of novelistic irony – cosmic rather than comic –
radiates from This Is Not That Dawn, the recent English translation
of Hindi novelist Yashpal’s thousand-page magnum opus from the 1950s about
Partition, Jhootha Sach(literally, The False Truth).
Tracking the lives and loves of a brother and sister across the worlds of
Lahore and New Delhi in the years both before and after Partition, Yashpal’s
novel generates dozens of alternative views of that cataclysm from viewpoints
male and female, Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Pakistani (even as these new
identities come into being and crystallize), prospective and retrospective.

Here is history on the grand scale – individual, national, human, all at
the same time. Each character’s position or dilemma carries its own distinctive
charge of hope, memory, conviction, doubt, faith, naïveté, prejudice, and
fatalism; a vast spectacle of human beings swimming valiantly with and against
the tides of history. If the narrator himself has something to say about the
logic or validity of the breaking up of India, it remains parcelled out among
the characters, and must be intuited by the reader.

But in fact, the feeling we take away from Yashpal’s novel is not that
of an entirely tragic story. Of course, Partition destroyed a particular shared
and historically stable, if unconceptualized, sense of what it meant to be
Indian. But as we perceive from the quest of the protagonist, Jaidev Puri, to
start his own newspaper based on the idea of secular reason, what it means to
be Indian would, in a new democratic and secular republic, have entailed
building upon a new foundation in any case. At certain junctures in history,
tragedy and progress may be inseparably mingled.

As these examples show, the work of novels is not confined to mere
representation of historical realities, although this is where they may start.
Rather, a novel may be a creative intervention in history in its own right – an
actual agent of history, passing on to the reader who passes
through its narrative field both its diagnostic and visionary powers. Indeed,
from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to U. R. Ananthamurthy, Bankimchandra
Chatterjee to Kiran Nagarkar, Qurratulain Hyder to Salma, Phanishwarnath Renu
to Amitav Ghosh, novelists have generated some of the most layered and
sophisticated visions of Indian history produced in the last two centuries. Yet
as a group, they fall into no school or political camp. What unites them is
their ability to illuminate the particular historical crux on which they focus,
such as the tension in Ananthamurthy’s novels between the hierarchical
imperatives of Hinduism and the egalitarian urges of democracy.

The novel form possesses certain advantages over other forms of
discursive prose as a lens on history. There’s the persuasive power and
ambiguity of a story, which may be read in many ways and asks for the
partnership of the reader in the unpacking of its meanings. The freedom to rove
in spaces of the past that we cannot access by means other than that of the
imagination. The potential to think not in a straight line but dialectically in
exchanges between characters, or switches in perspective between the narrator
and the characters. All of these make the space of the novel a particularly
fertile ground for historical thinking.

In fact, when they are themselves reinserted into the canvas of Indian
history, the projects of the Indian novel and that of Indian democracy – both
fairly new forms in Indian history – appear uncannily similar, and perhaps
similarly unfinished. As Indian democracy has, over the past seven decades,
sought to fashion a new social contract in a deeply hierarchical civilization,
so the great Indian novel has attempted to not just find but to also form a new
kind of reader/citizen, alive to both the iniquities and the redemptive
potential of Indian history.

About Me

I am the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf, (HarperCollins, 2009; New York Review Books 2013), and the editor of the anthology of Indian fiction India: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2010; HarperCollins India 2011). My book reviews appear in Mint, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Here are my selections for the Fiction & Poetry section of The Caravan for the month of August: Dilip Kumar's short story "A...

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My books: Arzee the Dwarf

Named one of "60 Essential Works of Modern Indian literature in English" by World Literature Today. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award 2010. Published in German (DTV) and Spanish (Plataforma) translations in 2012